Untitled Emily Rowley Project
TEEN Angst!! Oh wait, fuck, I'm 23.
written by Emily on August 23, 2025

I'm starting to make a little headway though. The occasional scrap of paper or unused napkin sometimes becomes the palate for my momentary inspiration, and I can feel good about myself knowing that my no doubt brilliant manuscript is coming together because I've scrawled "piss hole story" over an Arby's logo.

So anyway, continuing my streak of making posts that are too boring to be linked anywhere, and too marginalized to be enjoyed by anyone besides our core fan base, I've decided to put out, for public consumption, the little bits and bobs of story that I've actually managed to put to page. It's completely out of context, doesn't really make any sense, and might not even be any good. There's no title, no characters, and no story. But I'm giving it to you because I require regular doses of blind validation. And if you don't like it, fuck right off because I hate you too.

It's cold, don't go. I love you.

My life, to this point, has been largely categorized by feeling sad and no one caring about it. All I've ever really needed in life was someone who was willing to get up and follow me when I storm out of a room in tears. But it's never happened. As a child, I kept expecting my parents to sit down on the edge of my, softly explain to me the lesson that should be gleaned from my problem, and say just the correct thing to make me smile and hug them while the strings began to swell in the background. The reality was always that I'd cry and scream, make my grand exit, sit on my bed in anticipation and then, humiliated, sulk back to the living room (the strings naturally absent) to finish watching "Roseanne."

Roseanne was the one who did it to me. It was she, with her crusty exterior and shrewish charm, that effectively shot down my childhood notions of the Danny Tanner ending. I wanted bed-sitting and empathy, I got couch-sitting and apathy. It's much easier to be the Roseanne instead of the Danny, because then you don't really have to try very hard. You don't have to pack the lunch every morning, or tuck kid in every night. The Roseannes of the world get to yell and screw up and not come through when they should, but it's all okay 'cause they're just blue collar fabulous. They know they're not parent of the year, but they've done the best they could. The best they could is only motivated at commercial breaks.

Editors note: This is actually from a story I wrote for a college class, but I like it a lot (which almost never happens with my own writing) so I'm thinking of integrating it into my nonexistent book). It's basically a ten page short story about a girl dying her hair. So that's all the context you need, really.

It’s not that Ruby was ashamed her hair’s new found Day-Glo tendencies. It was true that the clearly labeled box of “aquamarine” dye had featured the sea mistress of the health and beauty aisle perfectly posed in an ocean of her own luxurious tresses. It was also true that Ruby’s own hair had come out looking considerably more like the frozen concoctions that her parents poured into thermoses before driving off to Jimmy Buffett concerts. But she’d become rather fond of it. There were times when she stood, running her fingers through the waist-long tendrils, positive that she now knew what it must be like to be a green apple Jolly Rancher.

No, as she stood there in her ugly thrift store sweater and polka dotted skirt, trying her hardest to look contrite, Ruby knew that it was futile to try and argue with one of the greatest love stories that world has ever known. That being her mother’s love affair with her daughter’s head of hair. Their supremely middle-class ranch style was filled to the brim with pictures of a five year-old Ruby as a flower girl, her hair in a crown-circling braid and stuffed with baby’s breath. A ten year-old Ruby with two massive pigtails falling onto the shoulders of her soccer uniform. A fourteen year-old Ruby with perfectly coifed ringlets, standing awkwardly next to her date to the Jr. High dance. An eighteen year-old Ruby in her senior picture, leaning against an oversized ’01, her head cocked and her back arched just enough that the mass of hair came within millimeters of the floor. All of these her mother’s doing. Every day was a new exercise in follicle frivolity, and Ruby was just the giant Barbie head to her mother’s perennial eight year-old. Ruby spent her life longing for scrunchies.

The endlessly problematic happenstance of Ruby’s existence was that she’d lost a cosmic bet in some previous life, and had been born with red hair. Not red red, mind you. Not the kind of red that might cause teenage boys to make crass remarks about a girl’s nether region. But not really blonde either. Nope, just strawberry enough that every person Ruby had ever encountered, from age three until her adventures in the color wheel last week, could assume that they were the first person to ever make the highly astute observation that the color of her hair was not unlike the color of the precious gemstone after which she was named. And while she never really minded her mother’s obsessive hair tendencies, she wanted to apply a chokehold to every person who deemed her matching hair color and moniker “ironic.”

It wasn't her mother's fault. She'd named Ruby after a crazy old aunt, an old money matriarch from Texas who always wore gawdy feathered hats and bright pink lipstick that was applied well past what could be argued as the endpoint of her lips. Oddly enough, she never remembered Ruby's name, choosing on most occasions to call her "Olive." Ruby was never sure whether this was because she reminded her great aunt of Olive Oyl from the Popeye cartoons, or because, in the end, most of the woman's thought processes came back to her great love: martinis. Regardless, she had brown hair. As did her mother, and everyone else on that side of the family. Fine, sandy, easy to deal with, brown hair. Her father also had brown hair, but it was dark, an almost inky black. So, it stood to reason, that this was what was expected for Ruby herself, which explains why her parents didn't name her "Chocolate" or "Twig." But no. Out she came and red she was, and Ruby spent her entire childhood giving speculative glances to post office workers and UPS men. She'd learned from her good friend television that these were the types of men that may have "entertained" her mother and given her a little red fruit of a daughter. Ruby was highly displeased to know that they didn't have a milkman.

The primal scream is a concept that no one really thinks exists outside of the movies until it actually happens. It doesn't seem like you could actually do it. We live in an age of technology. No one ever gets angry enough to just ape-scream out of nowhere. No, today we hop online and type in all capital letters, or we drive our gigantic SUV really fast, or we break out the vibrator. Nobody actually just screams anymore.

Then one night you're driving alone, completely pissed off because the McDonald's was already closed when you were certain that they were 24 hours, and all you want in the world is some shitty fast food, because you feel bad and that's how you satiate yourself, but you're not going to think about that, you're just going to think about the burger and finding it. So you drive five miles out of your way only to get a burger that's just going to taste like pepper and lard, but if you're eating it you're not thinking about the bills that aren't paid, or the class you didn't finish, or the fight you had with . . . well, name someone, really, you're just thinking about your disgusting heart attack burger going into your stomach and sitting like there like lead, making you fat and bloated and unhappy and taking years off of your life, but at least you aren't thinking about the other stuff anymore.

So you get it. You get the burger (you get two, actually, 'cause it's been an especially rough night) and you get a large order of greasy fries, because God damnit you're going all out. So you drive down the road trying with one hand to shove your generic lemon-lime soda into the beverage container you had to ask for, because your car is so filthy that there's not even an empty cup holder, they're all full of old drinks for other late night cravings, sitting still half full, the paper starting to slowly leak and rot, letting even older soda seep out onto the car. But you're not thinking about that either. You have your food and you're going to eat it. Sometimes you think you're going to puke it up afterwards, but you never do, you just eat and eat and eat and still feel bad about the things the burgers were supposed to make better.

Then all of the sudden the drink falls out of its container, soaking into the upholstery and drenching your bag of food. You grab it, try to salvage what you can, and take a deep breath. But all of the sudden you can feel it rising up from your stomach, from that ball of lead you've formed trying to forget the fights, and the bills, and the burgers and the burgers and the burgers and then there it is, it rips out of you, you scream at nothing, at no one, at the inside of your car. And then when it's out, all you can think about is how patently uncool you sounded.

Editor's note: Hi, me again, this is officially the only thing I've written 100% in the context of the book I want to write with the characters I'm envisioning in my mind. The rest of this are just little episodes I've written down free form and would like to fit in somewhere. I just didn't want anybody to read this and think I'd just ctrl+alt+Ved my livejournal, and then feel awkward about knowing too much of my personal life. Strictly fiction.

. . . the problem here is not that we argued, or even if I were right to get up and walk out. The problem is that after I left your first thought was not, "gee, you know, maybe that was a little callous and unnecessary, maybe I shouldn't have said it." No, your first thought was, "she's wrong to have reacted that way," and were content to ignore the problem until I gave up on a response from you and came back to dinner three days later.

No, mother, the problem is not that people sometimes disagree. We're people, we do that. The problem is that when you disagree you're never ever able to see yourself as having been even the slightest bit wrong. You know, I'm thinking back over the course of my life and I can't remember even one time that you've ever apologized to me. Not once. At least, not without a lot of sarcastic windblowing about how you must be the worst mother in the world and oh woe is I. Isn't it terrible to have a parent who has never done a single thing to help you? No apology ever came without the victimization, without the martyrdom. A real apology? Never.

All those times as a kid that I would get so angry, then even more angry that no one cared to console me. That's a joke now, that's something that's funny to us. We tell anecdotes about the times I would run away, then return sullen when no one gave chase. But you know what? Someone needs to do the following sometimes. You raised us to ignore the issue until the other person was over it. But it doesn't work. Someone has to do the apologizing or we just become. . .stagnant. And that is what has happened to us, Mom. We're stagnant. We don't know how to react when someone treats us badly. You have criticized every friend that I've ever had, told me they take advantage of me, that I should stand up for myself. Well you know what Mom? I can't, and it's because of you. I don't say that in some trite, psychoanalytic, "everything wrong with me is because of my parents" kind of way, but it's true. This is your fault. Despite all the love, respect, and affection that I know you have for us. . . you fucked us up Mom. Just a little bit.

And what is truly sad is that you're not hearing what I'm saying. That little martyr alarm is going off in your head and all you can think about is all the help and money and the time you've given us and how dare we be so ungrateful. Well, Mom, I would never take another cent from you, I would wind up on the street, if you'll just say you're sorry sometimes. Just say it and mean it, okay?

There was one thing I was sure of from between the ages of 8 and 18: that I was going to hell.

The hell story is cute enough. I'd never really gone to church, except when a concerned neighbor or baby-sitter would drag me to their service and I would sit, politely and patiently, waiting for the interesting part to begin, never realizing that I was supposed to learn something from the sermon. At one of those various churches I attended (it might have been Baptist, might have been Pentecostal, hell it could've been temple for all I knew) I got to leave big people church and head off to the children's sermon, followed by Sunday school, until someone came to pick me up and I could leave, just as oblivious as I'd come in. So there I sat, feeling lost and left behind in this sea of kids who no doubt had more religious perspective than just watching the religious movies every Easter at their grandparents' house. We did worksheets and crossword puzzles about the Hebrews and the Israelites, and I pretended to know what the hell was going on, while desperately wishing I had done a better job of hiking my tights up after I'd gone to the bathroom.

At some point, a little boy looked at me accusingly and said, "Why don't you know anything?!" I felt my face go flush, but I tried to save face by pointing out that I did, in fact, know something. His clever retort was his fat child finger, which he used to point at my blank worksheet. I didn't have a response for that, but when he turned away from me I felt it necessary to really let him have it, by looking at another child and giving the standard "he so crazy" hand gesture.

The second child, however, was clearly not on my side, because her response was to shriek, "WHAT ARE YOU DOING?" The entire class now looked at me, finger pointed to temple, ready to pounce on this faux-pas of Sunday school etiquette. I was not aware at the time, but you apparently just don't call people crazy unless you can bring the crazy. In a panic, I announced that I'd merely been twirling my hair around my finger. The teacher gave me a look, and we went back to what we were doing.

It was only on the ride home that it occurred to me that I had lied in church. IN CHURCH. I was devastated. I only went to church once a month and I couldn't even manage to get out of the place clean. This was most definitely the end for me. I didn't know much about the concept of sin, or redemption, but I was quite sure that lying in the building where they teach you that God hates lying was probably up there with the things you don't get away with. I might as well go back and Yakuza kick the pastor in his big bald head, 'cause I was already done for. . .

Editor's Note: Yeah, that's all I've got. Suck it.

So, yeah, there we have it. Some of it is good, some of it's crap, but I'd really like to know if any of it works. Granted, you can't really tell me if it works if I won't tell you what the story is about, or what any of this really means. So. . .I don't know. I'm sure Mike's post will be good. Go read that. You already did? Read it again. I hate you all. Never leave me.